Flat probability curves

What is your problem?

Real men love curves, user. Haven't you heard?

bc being really good at something but having a 5% chance to crit fail/succeed is terrible

I'd call this bait if there weren't innumerable examples of other people retarded enough to think that's actually how the rules work.

Crits in general (And crit fails) do not apply to all rolls and in some cases only exist at all as optional rules or accidental houserules that everyone assume are true because they never read the relevant section of the actual rules.

And generally when you roll dice anyway, crit just means that you always have a 5% chance of crazy damage to go with your 50% or better chance of decent damage

Once I "mastered" it. Once it all clicked and I started shitting out OP builds without trying at all is when I knew. Its a simple case of being able to look at all options and knowing exactly what will work best for me and what my goals are.

The problem is that there is just simply no other option for me. I am the kind of guy that wants character creation to last 3 hours and leveling to last an hour. I want choices, I want options, I want different things to pic from. 3.P is the only system that gives that to me at the level that I want it. If I make 10 different characters none of them should feel remotely the same in how they operate even if I pick the same base class. Thats why I continue to play it.

This is easy enough to address with a roll to confirm. Maybe a 1 in 6 chance to fumble if you get the worst possible roll on your d20. Sure, it adds an extra step, but it's something you only have to do 1/20 of the time (or 1/10, if you do the same thing with crits). Compare this to having to roll 3 dice all of the time.

I recommend picking a goal other than generating the most mathematically powerful character.

Thats what I do I start with an idea like "I want to build a character that swings a big fucking hammer really hard"

Then without even trying I;m talking I was trying NOT to build an OP character when I complied my level one character He swung a huge hammer that counted as colossal for damage. It just so happened that everything I just happened to pick piggybacked off each other. The DM called bullshit until he looked at everything and said "Yeah I guess thats real. I still cant allow it though."

It was only possible with a splat book though that gave level ones a back ground and through it a bonus. I picked smith which allowed me to count as one size larger when it benefited me.

When I realized most people who play it are like you.

It doesn't matter what system is used. The game is what you make it.

Honestly though. Why can't Veeky Forums be more about the games themselves rather than hashing out the rules dictating the games and trying to figure out which one sucks more?

The bottom line is: bring back the monster girl threads. I love all of you. I'm high af

It's only a circlejerk because one side is so incapable of producing any sort of arguments that they don't even bother.

But it's fun.

>the rules of the game have little to do with the quality of the game
What in the fuck are you gibbering about? Also not everyone who wants to play a roleplaying game wants to have to redesign the entire system they're using from the ground up so it's somewhat playable, they just want to play the fucking game.

>Veeky Forums
>playing games

Dumb frogposter.

My first experience with trpgs was a homebrew system so... when I eventually tried D&D it only took one game for me to decide it wasn't to my taste.

>
>not everyone who wants to play a roleplaying game wants to have to redesign the entire system they're using from the ground up so it's somewhat playable

Why wouldn't a game be playable? Would your reasons be the same issue for video games?

OP, please, do you even bait properly?
Allow me to improve upon your bait:

>flat probability curve: RANDOMNESS IS FUN!!!!
>dynamic Target Number: because I sure love keeping track of all of those shitty bonuses to roll
>a single value to track HP, no real distinction between Wounds and Fatigue
>non-abstract approach to wealth: because everyone loves playing accountant!
>badly implemented stat/skill system, secondary stats should never be used when calculating a roll

It's fine to not like things, user, but you need to accept that other people might like some things that you might like (and that's perfectly okay, too)

Fuck you.

Post.

Monster.

Girls.

>Inb4 a bunch of grogs come through and explain how they use a bunch of tricks to mitigate the system's garbage.

Sorry kiddo we're not going to do your work for you.

I to enjoy masturbating to my own superiority.

Only if you play 3.5, which for some reason that's what people assume the entirety of D&D to be. Should have stayed at B/X in all honesty.

FLAT IS JUSTICE

more rules, magic, items for combat and roll playing than role playing

...

Your mistake is thinking the game is shit. Your gm is shit. If you were the gm, then you are shit. This bait is shit. Shit/10.

I like Rules Cyclopedia and 4e.

The rest isn't very good. 3e is shit unless you heavily restrict tiers, and 5e is just bland.

Just confirm fucking crits, you snotling

I agree with all of those.

I fucking hate counting pennies/ammo/ and even XP. At least the last one only goes one way. It's still the fucking worst tho.

>3 dice
2-dice gives the best probability curve user..
>all the time
Oh, you're just saying 3 because you want it sound like a "lot of work" to roll more than one di, I see.

>I want to build a character that swings a big fucking hammer really hard
That's your problem, though. That's not a character, that's a video game build. Make an interesting character and have their stats/feats/etc exist solely to service their backstory/abilities, rather than thinking "I want to mechanically do something" and then min/max so you do that thing very well but have no character/personality to roleplay with.

Basically stop rollplaying and start roleplaying.

I don't think he's totally wrong. Most people aren't honest about their role-playing goals, play something they don't like, then end up either sticking in out of obligation or quitting.
Though I'm sure he wasn't implying the most OP build, the issue isn't the wrong build, it's having too limited goals.

I generally like D&D but armor not reducing damage and instead making you harder to hit is fucking retarded.

Immediately. I don't play D&D. I feel sad for anyone that had it as their first RP and now feels inexplicably tied to it.

If your armor bonus meant you weren't hit, then it means it DID reduce the damage to zero.

Also, hit points aren't meat points. Even losing HP doesn't necessarily mean you were physically hit.

>Even losing HP doesn't necessarily mean you were physically hit.
Can you explain further? Not trying to bait or anything, just curious because I don't understand.

>save or die
>caster supremacy
>15 minute workday
>only 3.pf

Also every edition before 3

Hit points are plot armour.
Even since 1e AD&D, they're considered to be a mixture of luck, physical stamina, mental fortitude, and magic.
The same description carries over all the way through to DnD5e (see page 196).

If an orc swings at you and you 'lose 10HP' out of a total of 30 it doesn't mean that you're one-third dead. Instead, it might mean that you ducked just in time, or braced it totally with your shield - but it took a lot of your energy/luck/whatever, and you know that it took a lot out of you.
On the other hand, if something didn't even beat your AC, it means it took no extreme level of effort to dodge/deflect/whatever, and you can do it consistently without trouble.

Basically, every hit that beats your HP is deadly by default. You spend HP to say "no it wasn't".

Literally every DnD edition agrees on this point.

Correction on secondlast line - it should say 'every hit that beats your AC', not HP.

not that user, but most things in d&d are abstract. though I guess you have to know d&d history to get that.

what kind of spicy meme is a 15 minute workday?

Also 4 editions of Shadowrun, Rolemaster, and WoD.

It's when the party blows all their spells and once-per-day shit in one fight and then rests to get it back. In practice, 15 minutes is an exaggeration and very few people would do it, but it's theoretically the optimal way to play.

In reality, it's more of a 3 or 4 fight workday which isn't so bad when you don't put a separate fight in every room.

AD&D had zero caster supremacy if you used initiative the way it was supposed to be used.

It was way to easy for your caster to be killed before he got off that critical high level spell to win the day.

No, a build is starting from the mechanics.

"I want to build a character who utilises the item [large hammer]" is a build.

"I want a character who swings a large hammer", as basic and one dimensional it is, is a character idea. You THEN look at the equipment list and see that there is a [large hammer] there and decide to pick it up, because it fits your concept.

The other editions are garbage for other reasons.

Except 4 and 5. They are kind of alright. But I still prefer other games.

Is that before or after unearthed arcana?

I never had that moment, I'm not American so I never really got sucked into the D&D style of "role-playing".

I just got a big culture shock the first time I tried it with some ameribros.

>Most of the group is barely in character.
>People talk about niches and slots, like we're trying to build a sports team.
>People "correct" each other's character choices for better performance.
>Feels like arcade shooter on rails where our contribution mainly consists of killing all the things in our way so we get to the next checkpoint.
>People tell me to ease up on the "overacting" because I attempt in-character dialogue.

Like, I'm all for the whole "as long as everyone is having fun anything goes" thing, but the impression I have from real life and from Veeky Forums is that 90% of D&D players really should be playing MMOS or fantasy flavoured boardgames. And the crazy thing is that since D&D is huge and actively pandering to the WoW generation, nobody really has a clue about more role-playing focused role-playing games (just listen to that sentence, it feels fucking surreal.)

It's not even that D&D is bad at what it does, it's just that what it does should really be put on a separate shelf from role-playing games.

Before, mostly. Unearthed Arcana mitigated some of that with more and better utility spells and lowering caster times.

You seem to have come from one extreme and bumped into the other, instead of realising they're meant to be harmonious.

The ideal situation is that you feel engaged with your character and the story (I'm not going to say immersed, because immersion is not always desirable and can often be detrimental), and that you are ALSO playing the game to the fullest and making the character that best fits the game and story.

For example, DnD is a game about being competent adventurers. Therefore, if your character is incompetent, you're being a shitty player. Same as if you were a shitty actor.

The point of an RPG is that you RP well, and you also play the game well. Otherwise you're not getting the full experience.

It's cool to say "I like this mechanic/power and want to build a character around it", as long as you roleplay it well when you're done. And it's also cool to say "I like this interesting character concept", as long as you also build it effectively.

I think I know, but which edition was it?
Also, that's not "american style" that's just one way.

>(I'm not going to say immersed, because immersion is not always desirable and can often be detrimental)

I have no idea how immersion could be detrimental to role-playing, if immersion is not the point, then there are way, waaay better alternatives for whatever else it is you're getting out of role-playing.

From where I'm sitting, the only job of the rules is to define how conflicts are arbitrated. They're not the point of the game. They're just there to keep it from bogging down. They're not the main attraction or main activity.

If all you're really doing is acting like a game engine calculator, you should be playing board games.

There is no "you're both role-playing and playing the rules" the rules are just there to keep the role-playing going so things don't devolve into free form or judgement calls by the DM.

>shows up ameri-bros with british accent
>their dicks shrivel up from the thought of doing the accent in front of a brit
>>just-just don't overdo it, a-user
>"these bitches hate roleplaying!!"

You can play like that in any of the previous three editions. It's most boring to do so in 5e, though, since there are much fewer choices to make past level 3 - it's overall quite a dull edition.

>There is no "you're both role-playing and playing the rules"
Of course there is. To take an extreme example, let's take the game 'Monsterhearts' which is based on the Apocalypse World system. Monsterhearts is basically 'Twilight/Buffy (the relationshippy episodes)/Vampire Diaries/Teen Wolf/Jennifer's Body: The Game'.

In Monsterhearts, one of the major subsystems in the game is 'Strings'. Strings are a representation of how much emotional leverage you have over someone else. They also drive play.
One way you can use a String is to give someone else a penalty on a roll.

Strings are abstract when 'in storage', but need to be concrete and roleplayed out 'when used'. E.g. if another PC is going to punch you in the face, you can spend a String and say "I laugh in your face and remind you of what a pussy you were trying to ask the hot girl out" in order to distract them and make it harder for them to punch you properly. You're both playing the game, and roleplaying.

Or to use a VERY simple example, closer to DnD:
As a paladin, you say "I notice my companion flagging, and take a moment to reassure them and help them walk", and Lay on Hands.
You took the mechanically correct action (healed your ally outside of combat) and also roleplayed yourself as a helpful paladin.

As far as when immersion can be undesirable - easy - it's when you run into the "But it's what MY CHARACTER what do!" issue. Sometimes what your character would do doesn't matter - instead its better to do what's best for the story.
It also means you can engage in dramatic irony - e.g. running into danger because you want to play out some kind of rescue scene.

I think his problem is the G in RPG. Games imply rules, without rules, it's not a game.
I think what he pictured RPGs as is just RP, you know LARPing without the LA part. Basically tabletop LARPing.

>BESM
>broken
Thou jest.
BESM does exactly what it was meant to do. It was designed with being broken in mind so it can't be broken.

And honestly, that's totally fine. Freeform RP, or moderated RP like you often see in 'parlor LARPs' are great fun. They're not better than RPGs. They're not worse. They're their own cool thing that share some overlap with RPGs.

There are probably far more people (and especially more women) online playing freeformish RPs on message boards than there are people playing RPGs.

>there are probably far more people (and especially more women) online playing freeformish RPs
Yes, I've heard of Facebook, thank you.

Do you even realize how poorly you troll?

>people don't want to argue with me because they can't

No, anyone can come up with the kind of petty back-and-forth arguments that come up in these threads, regardless of what side you take. People don't want to argue with you because you're a dumb cunt.

>Oh, you're just saying 3 because you want it sound like a "lot of work" to roll more than one di, I see.
The most commonly proposed alternative to the d20 is 3d6. I agree that 2d6 is superior. You only have to perform one mathematical operation on the dice to get a result, rather than two, and the vast majority of the time, the result is going to be 10 or under, making that operation very easy (and because of the limited number of combinations, you can recognize a lot of them on sight, without even having to add). But 2d6 has a very limited range compared to a d20 and so the two really aren't comparable. I guess you just said "2 dice" though, so we could go with 2d10, which is still pretty simple addition (1 digit number plus 1 digit number*). It's still marginally slower than a d20 though, and the effective range is still smaller (disregarding unusual results--you'll roll below 4 less than 1 out of 30 times, and the same goes for rolling above 18-- you have an effective range of about 15 rather than 20). And fuck rolling 2d12.

Anyway, my point is that while I dislike 3d6, I'm okay with 2d6, 2d8 or 2d10, which have their uses. They are by no means demonstrably superior to 1d20, however.

*Okay, it's not always a 1 digit number. You could roll a 10, but that's not any trickier to deal with.

i actually honestly had no idea that facebook was used for this. I guess I'm still in early 2000s mentality when it was more of a thing for private/obscure message boards.

Or Gaia Online. I had some good times there.

...

By the time I actually played D&D I had already played several other systems, some of which I disliked and some of which I loved despite their flaws. D&D l, however, managed to do practically everything I had learned to hate and none of the things I liked. Surprisingly enough, the end result was not better than the sum of its parts.

By RAW, a natural one ON AN ATTACK ROLL OR SAVE auto-misses/fails. Nothing else.

The ridiculous comedies of error that make such entertaining greentexts where a natural 1 causes a player to cut their own head off are based on terrible house rules.

That's just shitty GMing. I run Pathfinder, one of the systems that Veeky Forums seems to revile so much for having too much crunch, with my group and we've had entire sessions of pure roleplaying with no combat.

D&D isn't terrible, it's just grossly overrated. I'd chose a multitude of games before I'd play D&D, but I'll also never say no to D&D just because a group wants to play D&D.

To address your points:
Flat probability curves are there to make players second-guess their actions. You can get your character to a +5 or +8, meaning that on average they should succeed about 70-80% of thier rolls; depending on TN. However, because the d20 should roll every number 5% of the time you can never be certain if your character will or will not succeed. Ergo, you should be weighing all the possible consequences before taking any action that demands a roll. This is easily the most subjective flaw between these three, but it's isn't objectively wrong.

Save or lose is a complaint that could be applied to nearly every RPG system out there. Complaining that bad things happen to your character if you roll poorly at certain points of play is principally dumb. I don't really have a counter-argument here because that's not really a valid complaint.

"Caster Edition," is a two-sided coin. The idea that casters are OP compared to martials and skill-bots stems largely from people not understanding the base game, and/or trying to import rules from a multitude of splat books simultaneously. On the other hand I will agree with you if your argument is that D&D martials rarely feel as satisfying as casters. However, this has nothing to do with the class-balance,and more to do with the core combat mechanics of basically every edition of D&D being garbage. 4e, quite ironically, had some of the most solid base-mechanics there were, but then slathered shit on top in a misguided attempt to "give everyone something to do." The fallacy here being that each class should give the players fun things to do, and not the core mechanics themselves.

HP bloat stems from said core mechanic issues, but the 15min work day is a highly contestable point that could be a thread it's self.

>revile
>for having too much crunch
That's not even on the top 10 reasons people hate it.

I realized D&D was garbage when it was still my favorite even after trying out other medieval fantasy systems.
I count pathfinder as D&D tho

Please, enlighten me.

Pathfinder is essentially a clone of DnD3.x with some house rules tacked on.
This means that most of the problems that apply to 3.x also apply to Pathfinder.

Caster supremacy is the big one - classes aren't properly balanced against each other at all, which makes the GM's job much harder in coming up with appropriate challenged that make everyone feel useful - otherwise you end up with this video youtube.com/watch?v=zFuMpYTyRjw

It also uses 'natural language', instead of DnD4e's superior rules templating (regardless of how you may feel about the rest of 4e).

Its adventure paths are often poorly playtested - the most egregious example being the 'Caravan' segment of Jade Regent, where it was clear the centrepiece mechanic of the campaign wasn't tested at all.

Much like DnD3e, there's an overload of skills that could have been condensed down.

Mechanics like CMB SEEM like an improvement at first glance, but because enemy CMD rises faster than player CMB, actually makes those maneuvers LESS useful.

And some people really hate the art of Wayne Reynolds.

I think Pathfinder can be great fun if you play it with only tier 3 or tier 4 classes, and the free SRD is great for making it really easy to do that... but if you're gonna do that, you might as well play a game designed that way from the ground up and just play DnD4e.

Picture is a comparison of natural language vs templated language, although on the left is 5e rather than Pathfinder.

Oh wow, you're like... eleven shades of retarded.

I'm glad I decided not to take you seriously.

I'm not the person you originally asked.
You also haven't offered any counterarguments. You could at least have picked SOMETHING.

The standard defense is to just say "my dumb friends refuse to play anything else". We've all been there. It's an acceptable fig leaf. Just lean into it.

And that's not the person who asked you in the first place. I am.

who could've guessed these issues would arise on an anonymous imageboard???

You're mistaken. You seem to think that you said something worth debating.
You might as well say "The sky is green, what's your counterargument?"

The standard "defense" is just to ignore you.

good fucking taste

They're balanced against each other in that most classes can offer a unique skillset. Although in some cases they do overlap and out perform one another they don't really invalidate each other either. For example a party consisting of a Rogue/Bard can still work. Even though they overlap on skillsets the idea of them covering what the other can't is still there.

The natural language complaint is valid one is valid.

You can't actually "play-test" adventure paths, it would be pointless. A lot of different types of GMs and groups exists, they're ultimately just templates.

I don't know about skills, I feel like they're fine.
Certain feat chains should be condensed though, particularly combat maneuvers/styles.

Actually most penalties that apply to BAB/AC also apply to CMB/CMD. FCMD is a thing.

I agree, Wayne Reynolds is shit.

Honestly though if you have a competent GM tiers won't matter much. There's no reason you can't run a game with a Wizard and Fighter in the same party. As far as Core goes most exploits have been removed/nerfed.

I was slowly getting to the point, but the real thing that made me realize it. Was when a summoner killed an army, that I did nothing too as I playing a martial.

The thing is, if you have a great GM working hard to make different tiers feel useful... imagine how great your game would be if they could put that effort into something else.

Some classes really DO invalidate others. For example, the Inquisitor outclasses the rogue, while still being weaker overall than the cleric.

And of course it's possible to playtest adventure paths. Encounters need to conform to CR math and expectations. In the specific case of the Jade Regent caravan, party is actually mostly irrelevant - the caravan itself is mathematically incapable of overcoming most of the threats it comes up against, when it's supposed to be kind of an upgrade-minigame.

>Honestly though if you have a competent GM tiers won't matter much.

If you have a competent GM you can havr fun with FATAL.

Although, I fail to see how a competent GM is going to be enough to bridge the gap that is between a warrior type who can't cast and a caster type who can warrior, unless he houserules like a mofo or ensures that the top tiers are unoptimized as heck while shoveling magic items that have "fighter only!" written on them at the fighter, but w/e.

>Implying all of this is are problems

When it took our GM weeks or even months of time to prep sessions since he wanted to spent a lot of time balance the high-level encounters, just to have them all become insanely unbalanced encounters anyways that were either ended by the PCs in one combat turn or turned into the PCs getting hopelessly destroyed.

I fail to see how even a shitty GM wouldn't be able to bridge the gap. Casters need magic to warrior, Warrior need magic to caster. It's not hard at all...

Okay, look: A Warpriest can, with a single spell, be basically on par with an equally optimized fighter for an entire fight.

He keeps getting spellslots over his carreer, along with all kinds of new abilities.

The only possible way a fighter can be more effective in some way than the warpriest, is if you have more fights a day than the WP has spellslots. Even at that point the WP is just a slightly worse fighter, and not outright useless.

Which should not happen past like, level 4-ish anyway. Any slots on top of that means that the warpriest has net gains on top of the fighter.

You can do this with most casters that are capable of martialing, I just wanted to illustrate with the most direct one. The cleric/druid that builds for it does it even better anyway.

It doesn't invalidate or really even Overlap the Rogue much from what I see. I assume you're talking about using splat-books or whatever to replicate the Rogues trap-finding/sneak attack/talents? But that would be an issue with the additional content not the core content.

Encounters do need to conform to CR math and expectations but CR and expectations won't be set in stone unless every GM/group plays exactly the same. If you really wanted you could take an adventure path meant for a party of level 1 and calibrate it to a party of level 5 etc. I don't know anything about Jade Regent but if you know the math for the caravan is off then there's no reason you can't/shouldn't fix it.

>The only possible way a fighter can be more effective in some way than the warpriest, is if you have more fights a day than the WP has spellslots.
Unless the fighter takes a backseat and is dealt literally 0 HP worth of damage over the day, that won't work. HP is the fighter's expendable resource, and unlike the casters, he straight up dies if he runs out of it.